Harold Innis’s Final Course

Innis’s foundational role and representations of Innis in media ecology

According to Daniel Czitrom, for the “most radical and elaborate American media theory, one must look to the work of two Canadians, Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan.”¹² James Carey went further arguing that it was Innis’s work, not McLuhan’s, “which is the great achievement in communications on this continent.”¹³ And more broadly, in the words of Robert Babe,

Innis was likely the first to [relate] […] shifts in media technologies to changes in the distribution of political and economic power […]. He invented the term ‘monopolies of knowledge’ to represent not only concentration of media ownership and control, but also of the knowledges circulating in society as they affect people’s perceptions and understandings. He coined the term ‘information industries’ to highlight the economic/industrial dimensions of cultural production. He related industrial processes generally, such as the quest for economies of scale and mass marketing, to the production and distribution of culture through such constructs as ‘the mechanization of knowledge.’ Moreover, Innis’s analyses of the political-economic dimensions of media and changes in media technologies and patterns of media control were fully integrated to such cultural categories as conceptions of time, conceptions of space, education, literacy, the news and mass entertainment, and the mass production of culture.¹⁴

John Watson, in his unparalleled biography, Marginal Man, the Dark Vision of Harold Innis, states that Innis’s work “represents the old testament of communications theory, which, when paired with Marshall McLuhan’s new testament, forms the ‘Toronto School’ of communications.”¹⁵ This ‘school’—which began in earnest just one year after Innis’s death thanks to the efforts of McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter—played a significant role in what would become media ecology.¹⁶ It was through the McLuhan-Carpenter partnership along with others (including Easterbrook) that a seminar series featuring Innis’s work called “Changing Patterns of Language and Behavior and the New Media of Communication” was initiated in late 1953.¹⁷ Years later, Neil Postman, who coined the term media ecology, insisted that far from inventing it he had drawn on the work of others, including McLuhan, Carpenter, and Innis. Also, Postman, regarding his book The Disappearance of Childhood, stated that he took “as a guide the teachings of Harold Innis” as it was Innis who stressed that once a machine is built “it is quite capable not only of changing our habits but […] our habits of mind [also].”¹⁸ To give just one more quotation regarding Innis’s influence, Paul Heyer (another Innis biographer) is unambiguous: “Within the tradition of media ecology, Innis’ legacy […] looms large in the pantheon of luminaries” associated with it.¹⁹

Given the role played by Innis in both communications studies and media ecology, and Easterbrook’s position as Innis’s closest intellectual confidant at the time of his death (as discussed below), a book on Easterbrook’s comprehension of Innis is long overdue. Indeed, the lectures transcribed for this volume constitute more than Easterbrook’s intimate introduction to Innis’s thinking as they also clarify aspects of his contributions that have since been obscured or ignored. Before directly addressing these, some observations should be made as to how Innis’s research has been interpreted, most particularly by students of media ecology.

Among the overarching questions pursued by scholars involved in media ecology are the following: “what drives human history?”, “how are we to survive as a species?”, and “how are we to retain our humanity?”²⁰ These were of great importance to Innis also. In a speech made at the end of the Second World War, for example, he told his audience that “western civilization has collapsed” and its “rehabilitation” constituted an urgent task.²¹ In addressing this, he sought to understand what intellectual and cultural capacities were needed to go forward. “Stability which characterized certain periods in earlier civilizations,” he realized, “is not the obvious objective of this civilization. Each civilization has its own methods of suicide.”²² Among his other conclusions, Innis argued that people—especially fellow academics—need to understand their own circumstances by becoming actively engaged in self-reflective, philosophical thought. But given that most in the 20^th century had little interest in this seemingly obsolete (if not elitist) pursuit, Innis became preoccupied with identifying the means through which the importance of this kind of intelligence might at least be recognized. His most cited concepts from these latter years—media bias and monopolies of knowledge—were developed and applied with this in mind.²³

Classicist Eric Havelock recalls that Innis was never a popular writer in part due to his interest in “large ideas and major efforts of synthesis” that focused on “the possible interconnections between things rather than giving exclusive consideration to the things themselves.”²⁴ As a contemporary and someone whose work Innis drew upon, like Easterbrook, Havelock’s reading of Innis differs in some key respects relative to others, including McLuhan’s. Havelock, for example, recognized that Innis situated his communications research in the context of his political economy—an approach in which economic and political structures condition one another and are interrelated with developments involving both culture and media (including technologies). Of course, for Innis, communications technologies and techniques were important in terms of their influence on intellectual capacities. But having said this, Havelock argues that technology was never the central factor for Innis. For one thing, Innis recognized (as did Easterbrook) that communications enabling genuine forms of understanding are achievable primarily through speech. Although language is a social activity profoundly influenced by the technologies and techniques used to record and disseminate, the material means of communication are not themselves determinative.²⁵ To quote Havelock, while these means affect “the nature of what is communicated, [for Innis] the content still remains the fruit of human thought.”²⁶ For Havelock, “as one reads him, one senses a note of humanism, a sense of values which, to be sure, he assumed could be compromised by technology, but which are not created by it.”²⁷

These features of Innis’s approach—the importance of political economy, his dialectical treatment of technological developments and their implications, and his emphasis on language and humanist values—are recognized in the lectures published in this volume. Arguably, both Havelock and Easterbrook represent Innis more accurately than did Easterbrook’s lifelong friend, Marshall McLuhan.²⁸ This is an important point, especially given the extraordinary challenges most face when reading Innis.²⁹ For media ecologists and others, one outcome has been a heavy reliance on secondary sources and arguably the most influential of these has been McLuhan’s, beginning especially with his introduction to the republication of The Bias of Communication in 1964. Although McLuhan’s attention gave Innis’s communications work the prominence it never achieved while he was alive, his portrayal also shaped decades of readings that likely benefitted McLuhan more than they clarified Innis.³⁰

In contrast to Havelock and Easterbrook, McLuhan argued: “Once Innis had ascertained the dominant technology of a culture he could be sure that this was the cause and shaping force of the entire structure.”³¹ McLuhan went on to say (correctly) that Innis lauded the oral tradition as a means of counterbalancing mechanized (mostly printed) forms of biased knowledge. The spoken word, for Innis, facilitated many of the virtues that the written tradition restricted as, in most circumstances, human speech is a more engaging, flexible, and tentative means of communication. Orality thus constituted a (potentially) superior means of enabling people to pursue reflective and creative thought, especially through interpersonal discussion (Innis’s model being the Socratic dialogue). But having said this, McLuhan was incorrect in assuming that orality in and of itself was Innis’s ideal.

In several of the lectures prepared for Innis 4b, Easterbrook references that Innis embraced the cultural vibrancy of ancient Greece as a means of gaining perspective on the capacities of modern society. With it in mind, Innis thought that the oral tradition—represented by the humanities, art, philosophy, and other forms of intellectual engagement—constituted a primary means of counterbalancing the deleterious implications of print capitalism and mechanized knowledge. For Innis, the dominance of either the written or oral tradition undermined the conditions needed for order and freedom to exist in the state of balance or propitious tension that sustainable societies require. It was in this context that Innis understood Plato’s critique of the manipulative implications of ecstatic poetry not to be a one-sided endorsement of writing over orality. According to Innis,

Plato attempted to adapt the new medium of prose to an elaboration of the conversation of Socrates by the dialogue with its question and answer, freedom of arrangement and inclusiveness. A well-planned conversation was aimed at discovering truth and awakening the interest and sympathy of the reader. The dialogues were developed as a most effective instrument for preserving power of the spoken word on the written page and Plato’s success was written in the inconclusiveness and immortality of his work. His style was regarded by Aristotle as half-way between poetry and prose. The power of the oral tradition persisted in his prose […].³²

Just as Plato pushed back against (but did not dismiss) orality, McLuhan’s misrepresentation of Innis as its unreserved champion can be discerned by recalling that Innis himself criticized the disingenuous qualities of much discussion, especially its propagandistic and ignorant representations that circulated widely in the 1930s and, again, at the dawn of the Cold War. It was balance, not the dominance of one tradition over the other, that was most important. The “well-planned conversation” requiring both freedom and order was Innis’s ideal, and this required the structuring of media (including organizations and institutions) in ways that might facilitate a more thoughtful and self-reflective polity.³³

Easterbrook’s analysis concerning Innis’s quest for balance demonstrates that McLuhan failed to situate his work in these relatively nuanced terms. Indeed, formulations that McLuhan represented as those of Innis are more unidirectional and deterministic than what Innis ever said or believed. Unlike Innis, McLuhan idealized the auditory (which he related to tribal man, monastic capacities in the Middle Ages, and the modern electronic age) and contrasted the aural with sight and the objectifying and linear thinking he associated with printing and typographic man. Tribal man, he claimed, is nonalienated, imaginative, and open to a prospectively global cosmic consciousness, whereas literate man is alienated, controlling, and nationalistic. For Innis, despite his many shorthand associations and juxtapositions, such direct associations are not possible (more on this below).

Related to McLuhan’s misrepresentation of Innis on orality, the concept bias often has been read and applied in sometimes oversimplified or inaccurate ways. The comparatively nondeterministic approach developed by Innis can be seen in his treatment of the Greeks. Like Havelock, Innis stressed that the beginning of the written tradition facilitated a brief period of unprecedented (and never duplicated) reflective thought. McLuhan resisted such associations. According to Innis, the brilliance of Greece emerged amid conditions and mediations involving writing and orality that reflected and facilitated an extraordinary state of intellectual vibrancy. But also, Innis (as Easterbrook elaborates) emphasized the political-economic dynamics in which this hothouse of creativity took place, including its wealth, political system, and other capacities involving some very particular spatial (i.e., geographic) and temporal (i.e., historical) conditions. Indeed, Innis developed bias from his earlier research using economic theories concerning fixed capital formations and capacity. The latter was a concept rooted in Innis’s earlier studies concerning Canada’s development involving the exploitation of its staples products (especially cod, furs, timber, wheat, metals, pulp and paper, and hydro-electricity) and it implied both the potentialities and limits of any given political-economic formation. Bias, more specifically, emerged from his work concerning unused capacity which, as Robert Babe and Edward Comor demonstrate, became “a sort of éminence grise” for Innis, “exerting influence or constituting a historical dynamic that is, for the most part, unnoticed.”³⁴ In referencing both capacity and bias, Innis emphasized causal relationships that connote tendencies and dialectical interactions rather than unidirectional determinants. Here it should be noted that despite McLuhan’s influence, media ecology involves a range of perspectives, some of which resonate more with Innis’s dialectics than McLuhan’s tendency toward reductionism.³⁵